50 Books Every Geek Should Read

“Microserfs,” Doug Coupland
“Generation X” is the book that made Coupland, but it’s “Microserfs” was where the author truly got inside the heads of a generation of coders. ‘Serfs follows Daniel Liu and a group of his friends at Microsoft as they leave the Redmond giant and head to Silicon Valley to form a startup of their own. It captures the spirit of the time (the dawn of the multimedia era) perfectly, and if you’ve ever worked in IT or software development, you’ll feel like you’ve known all of these characters – hell, you might even be one of them.

“Flatland,” Edwin A. Abbott
“Flatland” might just be the coolest thought experiment ever. Imagine a two-dimensional world, populated with living geometric figures. How would they interact? What would happen if they met a three-dimensional being? That’s “Flatland.” Sure there’s some Victorian society social critique in there, but that kind of thing happens when you’re reading sci-fi from 1886.

“1984,” George Orwell
Honestly, pretty much everyone should read this one, but the omission’s even more glaring if you’re in tech. If we have to tell you what 1984’s about, you’re going to Room 101.

“Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley
The antidote to every shiny, optimistic, how-cool-is-the-future sci-fi novel, “Brave New World” warns of what we might lose while gaining so much from technology.